TVReview: Archbishop Alibrandi and Cardinal Casaroli were among a confluence of religious gastronomy that peppered the archive in the opening programme of Altered State, the latest national trip down memory lane.
RTÉ gives good archive. There must be labyrinthine passages running under Donnybrook with endless reels of frocked bishops on tarmac and earnest, spectacled nuns perusing plates of Jammy Dodgers in church halls, and Mary Robinson with cheeks, and Haughey with enough hair to flip rakishly over his bald patch, and audacious young girls with bouffant hairstyles and "wet-look" boots shaking their assets in the Ierne Ballroom. And, of course, the mother of all archive snippets: Gaybo unrolling a condom. If that man earned a fiver for every time that clip is used . . .
Familiar as this scrapbook of alarmingly recent history may seem, it is artfully assembled. With an emphasis on contraception, the first of three one-hour programmes examined Ireland's transition, beginning somewhere in the 1960s (despite or maybe in response to Humanae Vitae), from "a nation of self-denial and dedication to Church and family" to high-tech playground.
It unearthed some memorable TV moments, such as the goofy and affable condom-seizing Border guard with the sideburns, grinning with embarrassment when the TV journalist told him they were for his own personal use. Prof John Bonner, asked to comment on the unprecedented number of Irish women who could "legally" use the contraceptive pill as a cycle regulator, said: "Ireland would [ appear to] have the highest incidence of irregular cycles in women in the history of the human race."
What does seem extraordinary is just how rapidly the State has altered. A survey in 1974 found that more than 90 per cent of the population attended Mass every Sunday. A round-up of the usual contributors included a vaguely pugnacious Mary Kenny in a sari, on "the pill bill"; a woolly-headed Garret FitzGerald recalling how Pope Paul VI spoke to him for seven minutes in French on the importance of stasis; and, of course, David Norris on his battles with a State that saw itself as white, heterosexual, republican and Catholic. Some things, however, never change, and given that this first programme was aired in a week of controversy about Catholic hospitals, contraception and drug trials, maybe it shouldn't have been any surprise to see conservative Dick Burke orchestrally defend his passive-aggressive position on contraception and integrated education.
History would be his judge, he said with much pomp and hand-waving. "Historians have a way of judging with broader paintbrushes. We'll leave it to them."
FEAR, BOREDOM AND utter confusion make for an uncomfortable menage. Class of '76 continued the season of scary UTV dramas that leave you to climb the stairs to bed after the credits in a panic of incomprehension. Presumably, this time, some producer told actor Robert Carlyle that if he agreed to bring his not inconsiderable talents to the table, he'd get paid for standing still and looking pensive while cameras whizzed around him like frenzied poltergeists and the sound man microwaved the boom mike.
Despite battling the desire to turn the sound down - Class of '76 had one of those buzzy scores that make you think of man-eating parasites - two audible nights of the "drama premiere" later and it's still as clear as mud.
Carlyle played detective Tom Munroe, a skinny workaholic who had a big office with slatted blinds, a lousy telephone manner and an ineffectual boss who made Mr Plod look like Ghengis Khan. Munroe set out to investigate an apparent suicide and somehow discovered that the death was one of many suspicious deaths that had befallen members of the now adult victim's primary-school class. Okay, got that.
Then Munroe went to visit the spooky seaside town where the children had grown up, where the boats listing in silt were a convenient metaphor. Here, Munroe, who had all the classic symptoms of early-onset detective-itis (broken relationship, hidden depths, lousy diet), discovered that former classmates of the apparent suicide had been jumping out of windows and over balconies with abandon, they'd been in hit-and-runs, had their brakes tampered with and their vents stuffed. So, what does he do? He sleeps with one of them, a living one, an apparently sane, pretty, strawberry-blonde doctor. Unfortunately, with her mysterious giveaway scar, dead twin brother and talent for ventriloquism, that never seemed like a very good idea.
Meanwhile, there was a photogenic ghost hanging around, as well as a paraplegic child murderer and a brawny, existentially unhampered sidekick who said things like "my mouth feels like the inside of a badger's arse". There was also a ropy sub-plot, a B-movie version of Silence of the Lambs, which should have perished in the edit.
In the end, Carlyle's new lover seemed to have been responsible for the parade of misfortune. And, luckily, Carlyle, without exerting a single facial muscle or eating anything for the entire duration, had got to the bottom of the crime, or at least of the criminal.
I'd put money on this reappearing as a series. Everyone loves a gloomy Scot.
IF CLASS OF '76 was pretty awful, then Mummy's Boys was truly appalling. A nervous attempt at reality/makeover/ wannabe TV from BBC Northern Ireland, it had all the pizzazz of a tadpole. The five mummy's boys in question, three of whom we met in the first programme, were nominated by cruel and unusual relatives and friends to "have their apron strings severed". This Herculean task was to be achieved with the help of two "mentors" - therapist Fergus Cumiskey and army sergeant Aileen Graham - their aim "to turn these zeroes into heroes". So far, so pedestrian.
Then we met the participants: great big overfed lardy toddlers to a man. All three - farmer Sam (who was by far the most sympathetic), salesman Michael, and all 20 stone of pampered couch potato Derek - are in their late 20s/early 30s and all have lived at home all their lives, none of them seeming to crave the joys of the big bad world.
The mentoring consisted of Cumiskey and Graham nervously shifting around on a starkly "modern" set and thinking up "tasks" to stretch the boys (not difficult, given that putting on their own socks would qualify as an achievement).
Derek, after a feed of pints the night before and a breakfast of crisps and Coke, was sent to work as a chambermaid in a local hotel, where making the beds brought him out in a lather of sweat. Michael, the most privileged of the group - family business, Aga, rugby - was made to bring a bus-load of anxious German tourists on a tour around Belfast. It was hard to judge which was more depressing: Divis Tower, the bleakly deserted Harland and Wolff shipyard, or the hungover guide.
And then there was Sam. "The girl that would shift Sam," his mummy said through her alarming dentures, "would want to be a bit like me." Sam, unlike Michael and Derek, gleefully abandoned his "lovely jubbly" slippers and silage-speckled boiler-suit and shot off to embrace his task, a night DJ-ing in Lush nightclub, where "the frenzied crowd" gave him a rousing welcome.
"He's happy the way he is," insisted his mummy anxiously, as she watched her son boogie on the "mummy cam". One down, four to go then.
ST JARLATH'S COLLEGE in Tuam, Co Galway, that hotbed of Gaelic footballers, bade farewell to its boarders last May. For more than 200 years, St Jarlath's hosted up to 350 boy boarders, and its closure means there are now just three diocesan boarding schools left in the country (21 have closed since 1980). St Jarlath's demise, as recorded in Cogar: Deireadh le hAíocht, is another manifestation of our altered State.
This gentle portrait of the boarding school's last year had a ghostly feel, the corridors echoing with muddy boots and the clatter of industrial trays of mince and potatoes. Vigorous, self- sufficient boys were pictured hurling themselves on to rainy pitches and into a swimming pool, and rehearsing an operetta with the girls from "the Mercy". The bonds forged in Jarlath's, we were told, are lifelong. The documentary gallantly stuck to its intention, to record a way of life, a tradition that is now dying, until the the last day of term when our future legislators, sportsmen and teachers departed in their parents' cavernous cars to the music of their mobile phones.
Boarding school life before the 1960s, when our altered State began, was barely referred to. The severity of the discipline, the corporal punishment, the fear, was left uninvestigated, but the occasional quote resonated.
"There were boys here," said one past pupil, "dying of loneliness."
